Ambrosia Software Web Board: Joint Statement from Xsera and Antares Devs - Ambrosia Software Web Board

The below is a statement from the joint effort of the Xsera and Antares teams.

Xsera is a project being developed by Adam Hintz, Alistair Lynn, Andrew Moscoe, and Scott McClaugherty, with the help of Nick Farley, Taylor Vaughan, Steven Edwards, and Chris Pickel. We plan to make many enhancements to Xsera over the original Ares, along with allowing the user to experience the old game if they wish. Antares is being worked on by Chris "Pallas Athene" Pickel.

Xsera is being built from scratch, while Antares is using Nathan Lamont's released source code. This causes a few rather important differences to pop up:

Xsera and Apollo will be available under the MIT license, while Antares is required to use the GPL license, having used Mr. Lamont's original code. The MIT license is much less restrictive than the GPL - for instance, users of Xsera will be able to modify it and sell it, if they can create a good enough project (for example, if you did a total conversion, you could legally use Xsera and the Apollo engine, for free, to sell your product). The GPL requires that any products made from Antares be non-commercial in nature (you can't sell them), along with a number of other restrictions - so in order to sell your game, you would need to separately relicense the code from Mr. Lamont.

(MIT license used for Xsera - GPL 2.0 license for the released Ares code, and subsequently for Antares (with human readable version) - Creative Commons BY NC SA 3.0 for most of Ares' media - Creative Commons BY NC ND 3.0 for the Ares movies)

This competition is good for you, the end user: two products are coming from different angles to acheive a similar goal. When both products are complete, you will be able to try them both out for free - there's not many competing software titles out there like this. We're not angry at the other team (although that would be somewhat hard to do, as Pallas Athene is helping out on the Xsera project as well as his own Antares), and we will keep relations friendly between the two projects - there's no reason for us to to have any ill-will towards the other team.

Feel free to ask any questions you have, we will answer them to the best of our abilities.

This is awesome news, a bit of friendly competition should stimulate creative energy on both sides.

If either team needs alpha/beta testing at some point let me know, I'm currently running 10.5.8

A round of applause for all the developers.

Most plans to "revive" old games don't make it past the drawing board. Here we've got two projects that have both made tremendous progress.

Well done everyone... well done.

Ares is such a loved game!


So in the end we will have to versions of Ares that can be played in the OS X environment. One will be the spitting image of the original game and the other will be as close as possible but with the ability to go beyond what the original was.

How about online play? Say I was playing Antares and went to go play online, could I join an Xsera game if was using Antares, or would Antares players only be able to play other Antares players while Xsera players can only play other Xsera players?


Also, maybe we can hook up a progress meter signifying how close each project is to completion:

Xsera:||||||||||?
Antares:||||||||||?

Although this would be possible, it would be extremely difficult and take loads of coordination from both teams. Unfortunately, I think this would be highly unlikely. This would be impossible were the projects at a later stage, though, so if you could convince both teams that it would be worthwhile, you never know...

Although as Adam said it is possible, that's about it. It is possible, but would require a great deal of work past what is already planned for both teams. Xsera is being built to handle multiple clients, or players at the same time on a single host and the networking backend serves only to pass messages from the internet to the game-logic Lua portion and back.

The original Ares engine was designed for 2-player multiplayer maximum, and I am not sure how multiplayer messages are passed from the game logic to the internet and back, as I have not looked that closely at the original Ares code. It would be possible to create a "translator" for Xsera which would be able to handle Ares multiplayer messages and thus communicate with the Antares engine, but it would be limited to a 2-player game unless Antares implements its own more-than-2-player multiplayer.

Also, there would be issues with standardizing ship/weapon statistics and making sure both engines would interpret the game in such a way that neither player gained an unfair advantage by using one engine over the other in multiplayer matches.

Yeah, the cross-application multiplayer probably wouldn't be worth the effort. And both games are gonna be free so you don't have to make a decision on which one to buy

This is the blocker; the engines won't interpret the game in the same way. In particular, Antares' dependence on fixed-point arithmetic and its implementation of angle-slope conversion is probably enough to make it impossible to keep the two games in-sync.

This certainly sounds like good news for the end users
(I am one of the few here I'd say who still can play the original on native OS9 machines).

Very nicely done on both projects.
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...um aren't Joint Statements usually the last prelude to war...

I don't think so, and in this case the desire is to avoid that - to show that we're on the same page as far as Xsera-Antares relations. And I'm not exactly sure how you'd have war over two open-source projects where the projects' respective leaders have complete control over the source that goes into it. (note that I'm not asking you to come up with a way)

Women.

This isn't "Word Association Football", you know. In general, ideas are properly expressed by more than one word.

PONY

prophile, you know that is totally inappropriate. GO TO YOUR ROOM!

Don't worry, you can come to my room instead.

yay

LOL - I should hope not.
Seroiusly. Glad you guys are getting along.
I look forward to the completion of both projects.